Accelerated MR Thermometry for High Intensity Focused Ultrasound Therapy

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the temporal limit on the ability to measure temperature changes using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The limit was examined in experiments using a variety of imaging techniques for MRI-based temperature measurements. We applied these methods for monitoring temperature changes in focused ultrasound (FUS) heating experiments. FUS is an attractive alternative to surgical resection due to its noninvasive character. FUS treatments have been successfully conducted in several clinical applications. MRI and MR thermometry is a natural choice for the guidance of FUS surgeries, given its ability to visualize, monitor, and evaluate the success of treatments. MR thermometry, however, can be a very challenging application, as good resolution is often needed along spatial, temporal as well as temperature axes. These three quantities are strictly related to each other, and normally it is theoretically impossible to simultaneously achieve high resolutions for all axes. In this dissertation, techniques were developed to achieve this at cost of some reduction in spatial coverage. Given that the heated foci produced during thermal therapies are typically much smaller than the anatomy being imaged, much of the imaged field-of-view is not actually being heated and may not require temperature monitoring. By sacrificing some of the in-plane spatial coverage outside the region-of-interest (ROI), significant gains can be obtained in terms of temporal resolution. In the extreme, an ROI can be chosen to be a narrow pencil-like column, and a sampling time for temperature imaging is possible with a temporal resolution of a few milliseconds. MRI-based thermal imaging, which maps temperature-induced changes in the proton resonance frequency, was implemented in two projects. In the first project, three previously described, fast MR imaging techniques were combined in a hybrid method to significantly speed up acquisition compared to the conventional thermometry. Acceleration factors up to 24-fold were obtained, and a temporal resolution as high as 320 milliseconds was achieved. The method was tested in a gel phantom and in bovine muscle samples in FUS heating experiments. The robustness of the hybrid method with respect to the cancellation of the fat signal, which causes temperature errors, and the incorporation of the method into an ultrafast, three dimensional sequence were also investigated. In the second project, a novel MR spectroscopic sequence was investigated for ultrafast one-dimension thermometry. Temperature monitoring was examined during FUS sonications in a gel phantom, SNR performance was evaluated in vivo in a rabbit brain, and feasibility was tested in a human heart. It was shown capable in a FUS heating experiment in a gel phantom of increasing temporal resolution to as high as 53 milliseconds in a three Tesla MRI. The temporal resolution achieved is an order of magnitude faster than any other rapid MR thermometry sequences reported. With this one-dimensional approach, a short sampling time as low as 3.6 milliseconds was theoretically achievable. However, given the SNR that could be achieved and the limited heating induced by FUS in the gel phantom in a few milliseconds, any temperature changes in such a short period were obscured by noise. We have analyzed the conditions whereby a temporal resolution of a few-milliseconds could be obtained.